Abstract
Serbian medieval architectural heritage is notable for its sacred architecture including numerous Christian Orthodox churches built at the territory of former Raška state during the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Built in the so-called Raška architectural style, characterized by overlapping features of Romanesque and Byzantine traditions, two monuments—the church of the Mother of God in Studenica monastery complex and the church of Holy Dormition in Žiča monastery complex, are exquisite sacred structures and cultural monuments of exceptional importance. They are also remarkable due to geometric-proportional regularities of their design. This paper highlights the importance of geometric concept in relation to proportional analysis of these two structures. Here presented study is conducted by two means: first one—by investigating geometric scheme with equilateral triangles, incorporated into the layout and cross section patterns of each church structure; the second one—by classical proportioning that includes proportional roots, golden section and numeric ratios.
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Notes
- 1.
The most common approximated value for expressing golden ratio is 1.618.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Serbian Orthodox Church—Eparchy of Žiča for blessings and research permissions; brotherhood of the monastery Studenica for the hospitality and blessings; David Lingle Fellowship at Iowa State University, Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development (TR 36008) and Ministry of Culture and Information of Serbia for financial support; Central Institute for Conservation in Belgrade for technical support; project colleagues Marko Pejić and Leslie Forehand for the research material. Without all of them this study would not be possible.
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Dragović, M., Čučaković, A., Bogdanović, J., Čičević, S., Trifunović, A. (2019). Triangular Proportional Scheme and Concept of the Two Serbian Medieval Churches. In: Cocchiarella, L. (eds) ICGG 2018 - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Geometry and Graphics. ICGG 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 809. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95588-9_56
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